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The Royal Observatory Greenwich presents

Solar Stormwatch

Crowdsourcing

Transcript

Chris Davis:
The reason that we want lots of people doing this is because that takes away the subjectivity. If we have a consensus view of what a CME looks like and which way it's going then you can be much more confident about that answer being correct.

Steve Crothers:
So where you will decide quite which pixel is the pixel that you're supposed to click on is something that is hard to define, and it's hard even to be absolutely self consistent, and so you'll tend to sort of waver yourself as you click. But by taking everyone's clicks together, then you'll get a much better answer.

Chris:
If 90% of people say this one is definitely heading in a certain direction, say towards Earth, whereas a similar one may look similar but only 50% of people are convinced that it's heading towards Earth, that enables us to start giving some sort of confidence on our predictions.

Jackie Davies:
If we have an accurate determination on what direction these features are going in, whether they are actually coming towards Earth, then we are in a far better position to be able to prepare for their impact at Earth.

Chris:
The more people who can do this process, the more we will be able to know about one of these storms and which direction it's going in and exactly how fast. The collective measurements by lots of people is worth a lot more than a subjective opinion of one person.